Too Many Systems, Too Many Settings

I'm back today to re-read my New Year's resolutions. It seems I've strayed from the path.

The big two projects of the past couple months (aside from working on my dissertation implementation more than in the past) has been zilch and Caligo.

zilch (which deserves a better name, but stands for "Zach's Implementation Lies Cold & Hoary") is what the domino die mechanic idea turned into. It's a sort of board-game-style dungeon crawling RPG. It's actually pretty sweet. You represent characters with 4 playing cards (one of each suit), roll d6s for skills, use dominoes for an exchange/stance-based combat, track details with poker chips, and use Scrabble tiles to track and cast magic spells.

Yes, I finally have a decent Scrabble-based magic system! This time I started with the ~600 D&D spells and distilled them down to 26 schools/tiles, rather than starting with the noun/verb approach of most rune-based system. Tiles are often still combined to produce the more powerful spells, though.

Anyway, the intention of zilch is to have a lite, "paperless" play style for one-off dungeon crawls or short campaigns.

Caligo (the Latin word for misty darkness) started a week or so ago when I got a free PDF version of World of Darkness from a DriveThruRPG sale. While overall I found WoD to be yet another standard, solid, reliable table-top RPG system, there were a few little rule nuggets that intrigued me. I started putting together ideas from DRYH, QAGS, etc, pulling together a very lite, narrative-focused system for descents into darkness.

As you can see, I've drifted from my goal of "no new threads."


In other news, today I bought a Warhammer Fantasy Grotek and Felix omnibus. These stories are good fun! As I've mentioned before, I often get overwhelmed in the bookstore: so many great stories, so many worlds! How do I play them all? How do I build something better myself?

Upon waking from my nap, I realized I don't have to. As GM, we often rely on pre-packaged adventure scenarios. Why don't I allow myself to expand the use of such aids to include other creative works? There's all these great adventure short stories out there--recently Conan, Elric, and Grotek & Felix for me. What's wrong with "borrowing" those? Or maybe blending a couple together? Roleplaying is not a public presentation; it's a private, intimate sharing of tales. If my player's haven't read the stories themselves, the ideas are new to them.

I know this is certainly not a new insight. In fact, I'm sure I've read it a number of times in DM advice chapters: take ideas from your favorite shows or books! But I guess today I was ready for it, open to the idea that I am really only obligated to provide a fun afternoon for myself and my player(s), not produce a whole new creative vision for the world.

And this insight spills over into the rule design too. I'm getting overwhelmed here too. There are so many systems out there when you look past the handful of large publishers. And each one has some novel, intriguing aspect to offer. Yet there is no way to combine all these little gems, because each works because of it's home system. Lately I've been coming to appreciate even the advantages of different die mechanics. So many cool things are possible with only certain die mechanics; yet, each also has its drawbacks. But, in the end, you have to pick only one of them and play it.

It seems we all want, to some varying extent, to produce our own system: to tweak, to touch, to make the rules we play by our own. But, taken to excess (as I am always wont to do), this becomes divisive, producing a babel of systems so that players cannot move from game to game because each requires its own system. Obviously, there is a balance here. There must always be a bazaar of ideas and system options available; but it can be hard to decide to work towards system harmony and synthesis, rather than just throwing out one more discordant voice.

So, once more, I come here to put in writing: I need to focus my efforts on what I already have going!

Not a Scrabble-based Magic System

I can work on RPG design for 6 hours straight with only 2 breaks to pee, but grading for only 30 minutes makes me want to tear my eyeballs from their sockets. Today was my stay-at-home day, and I have about a 4-week backlog of grading to do. Therefore, a nap, dinner, a run, and 12 hours later... and I'm still working on my Scrabble magic system. (I did some grading in there though! And some laundry.)

When we last left it, I had a separate skill and power mechanic going on. However, I was running into trouble on pricing things. For instance, moving (M) anything--even a bottle cap--would inherently cost at least 3 mana. Yet banishing (E) a demon or holding (N) a person immobile would only cost 1 mana (though such acts would require a high skill roll). In short, mind-blowing magic didn't cost any more than subtle magic in the same discipline; it was the disciplines themselves that cost more or less.

Of course, the GM could adjust this per spell, but it still seemed too ad hoc. Or I could combine power and skill into a single mechanic. But I didn't want that either. I wanted them to be separate so you need both enough skill and enough power, and that one doesn't substitute for the other. Sometimes high-powered magic should be possible with low skill... it's just always much more dangerous if you mess it up. That said, it still seems there should be a general initial correlation--if you're highly skilled, you should be able pull together more power.

My post-run insight (I love those--it makes it all worth it) was the tile-based power levels I was considering varied only from 1 to 4, since I was saving the higher scoring tiles (8 points: J, X; 10 points: Q, Z) for mythical magical forms. But my skill levels run from +0 to +3, so just making the base power cost the Difficulty Modifier + 1 suddenly seemed so clean and simple, and fixed most of the hiccups I was struggling with. Now the simple skill steps also give a sensible base power requirement, but the two are still separate, so the GM can modify power as needed for certain odd spells.

So this means I am no longer using the tile scores. And then I decided to go ahead and drop the last real Scrabble-based constraint: the tile frequencies. Rather than requiring a certain number of a particular letter tile, just knowing the letter is good enough. Power levels should be set based on the task, not on the magical school.

And so suddenly I was free of Scrabble, because the only thing I'm using now is the 26 letters. And I think I'd do better if I dropped that too and used some other form to keep track of what "schools" or "runes" of magic a character knows. (A list on a sheet of paper comes to mind...) That way, it's more flexible--they can vary as needed by character or story, some broader or more narrow than others.

Overall, I'm happy with the way my Fluffy urban fantasy magic system is shaping up. However, I think the Scrabble aspect is done for.


I was thinking more about why this should be, though. I think the basic difficulty of a Scrabble-based magic is the flavor/world reason for it: why would a mage (randomly) vary in what spells he knows at any given time? That's basically what's being represented by a rack of limited tiles drawn from a larger pool.

Also, there's a game flavor at work here: resource management. So I think this system would work better for gamist games, such as D&D or GURPS. Also, then you could more easily map the tiles to a specific spell list (whether as stunts or specific skills).

The alternative to representing knowledge is representing power. This might make more sense--that a mage has various levels or fragments of power available at a time. (But again, why?)

The other thing to keep in mind is that Scrabble isn't the only way to approach such a "resource drawing" magic system. Playing cards, tarot cards, or dominoes might work better, depending on what you need. I particularly like the idea of dominoes--they just feel like little runestones in your hand!

So, while perhaps not completely abandoning it, I think I'll be putting this whole Scrabble thing in cold-storage after all... at least until I run across some magic flavor that actually cries out for it as a mechanic.

A Scrabble-based Magic System

A month or two ago, I was browsing around the various Fudge pages and ran across mention of a magic system that uses Scrabble tiles. I never found a fleshed-out version; just a few discussions of possibilities. But it got me thinking...

Most of the discussion focused on spelling out English words with a limited number of tiles (usually 7 or so) to cast spells. I thought this would be too limiting and time-consuming. But the idea of having 7 tiles prepared at a time, and drawing from a larger pool, was interesting.

In Scrabble, there are 26 unique letters and a blank. Each letter tile (but not the blank) has a score marked on it. Because the score is in the lower-right corner, even symmetrical letters (like O and I) have clear orientations. So, if each orientation of a letter had a different meaning, it would be possible to have up to 4 * 26 + 1 (the blank) = 105 unique representations. Some letters are much more common, and there is a rough correlation between score value and frequency. This suggested to me that it'd be nice to use the score somehow as a casting cost. Therefore, there'd be lots of have cheap, low-level spells, all readily accessible due to their frequency. Expensive, high-level spells would be vary rare (1 in a 100 tiles).

With over 100 representations to work with, I thought first of a full but simple language, complete with verbs, nouns, and prepositions. I looked through the first two or three hundred of the most common English words for ideas. Then I realized someone had probably already done this language-constructing work. As an example, I found http://tokipona.org/, which is a constructed language with a little over 100 words. Examining this made me realize this was too intense--you'd have a to learn a whole new language just to play a spellcaster! That said, if you're embracing the idea that RPGs are a life-style game, and wanted to reveal the magic system slowly over months of play, this could still be a fun avenue to pursue.


Back to the drawing board, I decided to just focus on the 27 unique letters (including blank). This suggested some rune-like combo system of subjects and verbs. GURPS improv/rune magic has 25 runes. Fudge's Gramarye has 22 colleges and realms. And then there's Fudges 4x5, which as 9.

It turned out to be pretty easy to fill in 27 runes. Soon, I was creating 4 variants for each rune, each of increasing complexity. For example, the Earth rune might have 4 levels: 1) sand/clay 2) stone/solids 3) metals 4) crystals. Similarly, the Sense rune (separate from Knowledge) could involve: 1) heightened senses 2) see through material 3) true-seeing (see through magic) 4) scry (see through distance). Perhaps rotating each tile would add one to its basic mana requirement (which is initially its Scrabble score).

By this point I realized I was back to the original problem: 105 representations is too much! And that's before you even start combining them to make spells.

The other annoying thing I was running into was lack of orthogonality. That is, there was frequently more than one way to do something. For example, if Mind is a noun, then should controlling that mind require the Move or Transform rune? Or should there be a separate Control rune for mental actions? Is steam Air or Water? Do you need both Earth and Water runes to affect mud? Even if it's pretty thick mud? I decided that, if I was going to do this whole combo approach, I would just stick with the 4x5 system. (And, actually, I'd consider combining Mind and Spirit into one category, making it 4x4.)


At this point I was getting ready to give up the project as just too complex. But then I realized I didn't really have an idea of what I was trying to do here, other than use Scrabble tiles in some way. I had no overarching vision. So I went back to examine the real Magic System Basics in order to consider my options.

In the last couple months, S. and I have been watching and reading a lot of Dresden Files, which is basically an fun urban fantasy setting. It gels nicely with other similar material, such as from Neverwhere, American Gods, Nightwatch, etc. This gave me a flavor for my magic: I wanted some sort of subtle magic that could pass in an urban setting, but that is still capable of producing the world-shaking spells of myth and legend, and can include any kind of historical magic system.

We've also been playing a lot of Huffy/Fluffy lately, so I decided I wanted a simple magic system--which is almost in conflict with the complexity naturally suggested by a Scrabble system's potential.

I also realized I don't need to use the full Scrabble tile set. In fact, if I did, it'd mean every magic-using player would need their own full Scrabble game! So I cut the set in half. This means a few characters--such as K, the only 5-point letter--might get thrown out... but only if every caster needs the full half-set.


So, the past few days, I've been doodling ideas and finally inspiration hit last night that brought all my various notes together. I will use a single Magic skill to determine casting ability. Magic is an exertion of will on the world, and so it must overcome the inertial disbelief of those around you. (Though I've never played, or even read much of it, I guess this is basically the Mage: The Ascension idea here.) This makes it easy to adlib spell effects--it's basically dependent on how overt and unlikely the spell effect is. This is the core, simple thing used to adjudicate spell effects, and the system could probably just run on this alone.

The complexity--and flavor--is then in what kinds of magic a character knows, since not every character is good at every kind of magic. This is represented by the Scrabble tiles. I'd like to have these gained through gameplay, rather than simply bought with skill points. Each tile corresponds to a magical verb. There are no nouns; those are implicit/provided by the casting ritual of the spell. Each verb has a mana cost corresponding to the tile's Scrabble score. I'm not messing with different tile orientations, but multiple tiles of the same letter can provide more intricate effects (with appropriately higher mana costs). Most spells would involve a single letter, but some higher spells could involve more.

The challenge for characters in this system is to come up with enough mana at once to cast spells. A higher Magic skill gives a caster a couple more points, but the rest comes from special locations, rituals, items, etc. I'm using the magical laws of Similarity and Contact in all of this too.

Anyway, I think the basic ideas are together, but I still have to flesh out all the details. If it works out, this will likely become a possible Zludge/Fluffy magic system. Sadly, I'm no longer using the full information-encoding potential of the tiles, or the mechanic of tiles being drawn randomly from a pool, or 7 tiles being held in the mind at a time. But I think I made the right decision to start with the flavor of the magic and the nature of enclosing gaming system I wanted instead. I think the tiles will be a nice touch just as a physical representation of accumulated knowledge, as well as handy representations of spell costs.

Notion: Magic System Basics

I've been thinking about magic systems this week. I've been pondering a while on a Scrabble-tile-based system for Zludge. But, as I often do, when I get stuck I explore the basics to try to figure out what the factors are.

First of all, there's a vast variety of magic systems. For examples, I've just been looking at D&D, GURPS, Fudge, and FATE--and that's been enough! There's also related and parallel magic-like systems, such as psi, ritual/incantations, and superpowers.

I think the great variation of magic is just because every fictional world tends to have its own magic/supernatural rules--what's possible and how hard it is to do. So one magic system is definitely not going fit all games, just in terms of flavor.

The other side of that flavor coin is the rule mechanics. I've identified three concerns here:

First, how detailed is the system? That is, is it based on just a handful of guiding principles, a few tables of modifiers, or a complete book laying out every spell in detail? Detail may be a boon or a curse, depending on your play style.

Secondly, how diverse is the magic that needs to be modeled? For instance, is magic in this world basically only telekinesis, where physical objects can be moved and that's it? Or are we modeling a long tradition of every diverse occult effect, from summoning demons to levitating to blasting fireballs, from combat casting to potions to hour-long rituals?

Finally, is the magic system balanced? This means between uses (so casting a certain spell has a consistent cost), within the magic system (so a mage specializing in divination gets just as much of the limelight and story power as one specializing in evocation), and with the rest of the game mechanic (so that non-mage characters aren't overshadowed by the mages).


With these concerns of detail, diversity, and game balance in mind, we can look at how various general mechanics satisfy these. First, there's the issue of how magic is purchased by a character. One option is as skills--where each use requires a check or roll, just as with any other non-magical ability. Another option is stunts--one-time uses that a player usually checks off when used (though not necessarily: a stunt may be more like a feat, usable at will). Additionally, there might be power levels, which usually determine the strength of effects. Power levels usually operate in conjunction with skills or stunts.

These purchasing modes--skills, stunts, and power levels--provide a means for game balance. However, magic could be something simply accumulated through play. D&D's wizard's spellbook and Unearthed Arcana's incantations work a bit like this.


So, aside from how the magic is purchased, what is the basic game mechanic? The first is the exhaustive, specific spell list. D&D uses this approach (where each spell uses a stunt-like spell slot), but so does GURPS (where each spell is a separate skill, with a diverse tree of spell-skill dependencies). This could also be used very nicely on a small scale, as with Fate's example of Pyromancy stunt magic. The advantages of the spell list is extensive detail and, assuming sufficient playtesting, good game-balance. But detail is its own curse--now every time a spell is cast, the books need to come out to check the rules. Also, one is not meant to adlib new spell effects when you have a spell list.

A second mechanic is the general skill. So, unlike GURPS one-skill-per-spell, what I mean here is that one or more skills determines success in a wide variety of endeavors. In short, details such as range, duration, and effect are not set by the spell itself, but adlibbed according to some guidelines. This is seen in simple Fudge-like magic systems, such as Fate's Improvisational Magic. In a very simple system, the GM specifies how hard a certain affect would be to achieve and the player justs roll against a single Magic skill to determine success.

Often the skill roll is combined with power-levels. GURPS psi works a lot like this. For example, the character's telekinesis skill determines the control the character has, but her telekinetic power determines how heavy an object she can affect. (GURPS psi skills are defined so narrowly to be practically a spell list, however.)

Stunts could be used generally too. For instance, a character could perhaps produce 3 Illusions a day, but determine at the time of casting the details of those illusions.

A third mechanic is the combo skill. This is essentially run as a per the general skill mechanics, but each spell success is determined by some combination of skills. This could be an averaging, one roll for each skill involved, or just rolling the lowest skill. Fudge's 4x5 and Gramarye systems and GURPS Magic's improvisational rules work like this (using a combination of college/verb and realm/object skills), as do D&D's incantations (using non-magical skills).

I don't know of any combo-stunt systems, but it seems such as system would certainly be possible.

Finally, magic might use some completely separate mechanic, such as using playing or tarot cards, marbles, or Scrabble tiles. But usually these can be boiled down, or at least compared to, stunts or skills.


So, from what I see here, a magic system is basically going to let a character roll some skill or invoke some stunt to produce an effect. This is because skills and stunts (and power levels) are the core RPGing mechanic and, to maintain game balance and functionality, any major/integral magic system should be in these terms.

So, the first question is to determine the flavor and diversity of the magic you want to model. Then, look to what detail you want to use to model this. With high diversity, high detail will be a major undertaking. Also, your game system will probably direct you on this--high detail systems (such as D&D and GURPS) favor detailed spell lists, while Fudge prefers general and combo skill rolls. The advantage of detail is all the consistency and game balance kinks can be worked out beforehand. The advantage of less detail is that you can make it up as you go, letting player and GM creativity shine.